


Agent at the End of the World

by the_wordbutler



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 19:37:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1481515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Several months ago, Phil Coulson asked Melinda May—the Cavalary—to join his hand-picked team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.</p><p>But Nick Fury picked her first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Agent at the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ and a number of _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._ episodes, including “Turn, Turn, Turn.” 
> 
> Thanks as always for Jen and saranoh, who are always willing to read my stuff--even when I verge off my beaten path.

“What do you mean ‘he’s dead?’” she demands, her grip tightening around the phone receiver.

“I mean he took a magical Asgardian staff to the middle of the chest,” Nick Fury responds, “and I watched him bleed out.”

The secured line crackles in Melinda’s ear, loud as thunder but still softer than her heart hammering behind her rib cage. For the last thirty-two hours, she’s manned this particular branch of the S.H.I.E.L.D. emergency alert system single-handedly, prioritizing and queuing tasks for dozens of departments inside the agency. She’s read and flagged every last one of them, from attack on the Helicarrier by a brainwashed Clint Barton to Manhattan’s near-miss nuclear annihilation. But this—

She swallows.

Her screen displays eight new alerts, all Level 5 clearance or higher. None mention Phil Coulson.

“I think he knew they’d never come together on their own, not with Banner on the loose and Stark pulling at Rogers’s pigtails,” Nick continues after a few tense seconds, and Melinda blinks as the screen’s bright edges start to blur in her vision. “He figured he’d stall Loki, maybe scare him, but—”

“You’re sure?” Melinda interrupts, and the line falls silent. She ignores the uncharacteristic catch in her voice and swallows again, harder. “You thought you lost him in Qatar, too, until he found the caravan of camel dealers and—”

“Melinda,” he cuts in. If her voice is too shaky, his is too gentle. “Trust me. I’m sure.”

More alerts ping into the system—alien tech found by eighth graders on the East Side, six new lawsuits filed against S.H.I.E.L.D. and subsidiary agencies, a riot in Harlem that may or may not be related to the Hulk’s recent reemergence—and Melinda ignores the next crackle in her ear to start assigning them out. She’s almost filled legal’s queue, her fingers clattering across the keyboard and her screen clearing rapidly, when Nick sighs. “I’m on with the council again in a couple hours,” he says quietly, “but after that, I’ve got a few days of red tape bullshit I can handle just about anywhere. I can grab a jet, fly out to the Hub, and we can—”

“You should be at the Triskelion,” she informs him. 

“No, I should be where I’m needed,” he retorts immediately, and she grits her teeth as she starts scrolling through the uncategorized alerts. “If that’s at the Triskelion, then that’s where I’ll be. And if it’s at the Hub, then—”

“If this is you worrying,” she interrupts, “stop. I’m fine.”

He snorts in her ear. “You sure about that?” he asks.

“Positive,” she returns, and aside from the occasional crackle, the line falls silent again.

The topic changes to business, after that, to the endless stream of alien-related alerts in the administrative system and to the repair crews already on the Helicarrier. Melinda keeps her fingers and brain moving, assigning out new alerts as soon as they appear on her desktop; Nick’s voice in her ear is low, familiar white noise, an almost-calming presence in the chaos of the last day and a half.

But when the conversation ends and the handset’s back in its cradle on her desk, Melinda feels her throat thicken and her chest seize up tight. She closes her eyes for a moment, trying to breathe deeply, but etched on the insides of her eyelids is the vision of a limp, pale Phil Coulson bleeding out somewhere on the Helicarrier.

By the time her eyes fly open, she’s gripping the edge of the desk with trembling, white-knuckled hands. The alerts slowly filling the screen blur in her vision until it’s all a hazy sea of pixels.

She forces herself to sit up straighter, to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth in long, even breaths. Within a minute, her pulse slows; after three minutes, she uncurls her fingers.

Four more alerts ping into the system, low-level damage reports about the few aliens that breached the response team’s perimeter.

Melinda stares at them for a moment before she assigns them out.

She’s a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent at the end of the world, she reminds herself. There’s work to do.

 

==

 

“I need you to put something together for me,” Nick says on a Saturday morning.

They’re sitting at a café about thirty miles outside of the Paris city center in the balmy summer air, the steam curling off their third or fourth cups of coffee as they enjoy fresh-baked bread, the breezy weather, and the activity of a less-busy street. Melinda’s spent the last six weeks on an administrative inventory of their European safe houses, and there’s a spreadsheet of guns and gadgetry open on the tablet in her lap. Nick’s spent the last six weeks placating the World Security Council and calming the fears of many shaken S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.

When he’d shown up halfway through Melinda’s stop in Prague, she’d ignored it. When he’d keyed himself into her hotel room in Budapest, sopping wet from the rain, she’d ignored that, too.

But it’s her fourth day in Paris, and he’s still here, the newspaper folded in front of him and his eye trained carefully on her face.

She sips her coffee. “I never took this for a social call,” she informs him.

The corner of his mouth twitches into a tiny smile. “Could be both.”

“You’re miserable at multitasking.”

“Still could be both,” he insists, and she raises an eyebrow. He chuckles at that, a warm sound in the back of his throat, and extracts a plain manila folder from the folds of the newspaper. He spreads it open before sliding it across the table. “I need somebody in administration—somebody who knows our personnel systems inside and out—to assemble a team,” he says. “Nothing too big or showy, just three or four decent agents from different disciplines, plus a couple alternatives in case somebody decides they're not interested. Enough to cover all these skill sets without anybody asking questions.”

Melinda rolls her lips together. The cover page of the document consists of three carefully divided columns, each one divided further into two categories: _imperative_ and _preferred_. She skims the lists quickly, ticking off what she can in her head—a biomedical engineer might cover two-thirds of the scientific and medical skills, but not all of them; the specialist skills are nothing that’s not already in her own arsenal. When she’s finished the page, she glances over at Nick. “Mission parameters?” she asks.

He sips his coffee. “It’s a Level Eight.”

“If I’m putting together your dream team, it’s not really Level Eight.” His cup settles back in its saucer. “You know I trust you,” she presses after a moment of silence, “but after everything that’s happened, I need to know—”

“I have an agent I want back in the field,” he says finally, holding up a hand. “I don’t think he’ll do it for just anybody, or in your run-of-the-mill circumstances, but I know the way he thinks. And I know that if I let him put together a hand-picked response team, he’ll come around.” He nods to the folder. “I just need the team to be the _right_ one. No better way to do that than to hand deliver him some top candidates.”

Melinda closes the folder and folds her hands on top of it. “There’s not many people you’d do something like that for,” she points out.

“List gets longer every day,” he replies, and picks up his coffee again.

They sit together until their cups are empty and the bread basket in the center of the table is reduced to crumbs, and Nick’s coat billows out behind him as he rises and pushes in his chair. He rounds the table and bends close, and for a moment, Melinda smells his aftershave as strongly as the coffee. He kisses her somewhere between the temple and her ear, his lips lingering too long.

“Headed back to work?” she asks.

“Sadly,” he admits, and strokes her shoulder.

She almost lets him leave, his newspaper folded on the corner of the table and the manila folder under her saucer, but instinct wins out. She catches him by the arm, her fingernails digging into the leather of his coat; he blinks once in surprise but freezes at her side.

He knows her skills at hand-to-hand combat.

The other couple on the patio are staring.

“Swear to me,” she says quietly, her voice tight even to her own ears, “that this mysterious mission won’t get the agents I pick killed.”

He shakes his head. “That’s not a promise I can make, Melinda,” he replies, and he squeezes her hand before he walks away.

 

==

 

Melinda slaps him when he tells the truth about the mission, the sound of skin against skin echoing through the apartment.

They technically own three apartments—one on the outskirts of D.C., one twenty miles outside the Hub, one in New York City—but only the one in New York feels like home, littered with old books and older records, photographs of their wayward youths and half-forgotten extended families. Nick clenches his jaw as she stalks away from him, pacing a loop around the coffee table. Only the living room’s protected by the sound-dampener he’d pulled from his briefcase forty minutes ago. Without it, the neighbors can hear them breathing; with it, she can kick the coffee table hard enough to topple it and no one outside the dampener's range even notices. 

“He was _dead_ ,” she sneers, turning on her heel to gape up at Nick. He stands just left of the fireplace, his hands in his pockets; she jabs a finger in his direction. “You let me and everyone else who cares about him believe that he died protecting us from Loki. You called me personally to tell me. And now, you’re saying—”

The words dissolve into a red-hot anger that boils and burns in the pit of her stomach, and she twists away from him. When she punches the wall, a photograph rattles. She leans her full weight on the knuckles of that hand and drags her other hand through her hair.

“I had to keep it classified until we knew it worked,” Nick says, his voice calm and steady as she’s ever heard it. “I had to make sure what we did—how we saved him—didn’t cause any problems. For him, for anybody else at the facility for—”

“Phil Coulson died,” she breaks in. Her breathy whisper reminds her of a fading echo. “He died on the Helicarrier, by Loki's hand, and now you’re telling me that you used some kind of alien technology, some totally untested science, to bring him back to life.”

“I am,” Nick says. Melinda turns just in time to watch him purse his lips. When he tightens his shoulders, she steps away from the wall. “And until we’re sure that it’s going to keep working, I need you on that team as much as I need Specialist Ward.”

The sound dampener prevents the neighbors from hearing the second time she slaps him, or when she sweeps the dampener off the mantel and throws it at the wall.

But it doesn’t hide the sound of her grabbing her keys and coat, or the slam the front door behind her. 

 

==

 

“You’re different,” Phil says one night, and Melinda glances up from the mission report she’s finishing.

It’s late and dark in the Bus, the overhead lights all switched off save for the one directly above her small table, and she forces a smile as Phil slides in across from her. The Bus flies on advanced autopilot such that she’s able to step away from the cockpit for dinner and sleep; still, she prefers the privacy of her one small room to the faces of her so-called teammates.

She signs off on the report and sets down her pen. “I could say the same thing about you,” she points out.

Phil smiles softly. “You spend most your time trying to convince me I’m _not_ different,” he reminds her, and she snorts as she glances out the window. “But you— Something’s wrong. Something beyond our shared history.”

She rolls her lips together, staring at the hazy half-moon of her reflection in the window. They’re above a cloudless patch of ocean, and the world below them is, at least for now, layers of black atop black. She thinks of the black in her dreams, the visions of Phil hooked up to complicated, impossible machines, and she twists away from the window before her stomach ties itself into knots.

“I’m fine,” she assures him as she meets his steady gaze. When he raises an eyebrow, she rolls her eyes. “Do you want me to put it in writing? Have Fitz build a polygraph to hook me up to? Because other than being back in the field—against my will, by the way—I’m fine.”

He laughs a little at that, a familiar chuckle deep in his chest. “You’re not going to let me live that down, are you?” 

“Not on your life.”

Later, Melinda stands in the cockpit, the receiver for her secured line in one hand as she stares at the blinking blue message light. Nick’s called three evenings this week, waiting for a mission report; she’s avoided him every time.

She slams down the receiver before heading back to the pilot’s seat.

 

==

 

“I don’t have emotional attachments,” she informs Grant Ward as she straightens her t-shirt in the hotel one morning. “Too complicated.”

A pinched expression crawls across his face, and Melinda ignores it as she reaches for her jeans. They’re wheels up in another hour, plenty of time to crawl back into bed and kill a bit more time, but she feels itchy, ready to fly. The last few weeks of missions, from the girl with the dimension-hopping stalker to Coulson’s kidnapping, have left her feeling edgy, like she’s veering out of control toward some sort of tipping point.

She thinks the others feel it too. She knows Ward does, tossing and turning while she’s trying to sleep on the other half of the bed. Twice, she’s left him in the dead of night and returned to the Bus.

He’s never questioned that. Not, at least, until this morning.

“C’mon,” he goads, crossing his arms over his bare chest. There’s a towel slung low on his hips, and moisture from the shower still clings to his hair. She stops reaching for her jacket to raise an eyebrow. “You weren’t born a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. You’ve been on more missions than I can count, probably holed up with some interesting characters over the years. You can’t tell me you’ve never at least inched across that line.”

Melinda snorts at him. “You’re not asking about inching. You’re asking about flying over it. In direct violation of thirty different agency protocols.”

He rolls his eyes. “So that’s a no, I take it?”

“It’s a no,” she lies, and slips out of the hotel room without another word.

 

==

 

“You’re supposed to be keeping track of his physical and mental health, not encouraging him to ferret out agency secrets!” Nick snaps at her, and Melinda grits her teeth. They’re still on a jetway a few miles outside the Academy; the team’s placing a few last-minute touches on mission reports while she engages in her usual preflight checks.

Or that's what they _think_ she's doing, right now.

“Do you know how much I risked, handing him that doctored shitstorm of a medical report? Because the _second_ he really starts looking at it—or worse, hands it to your team doctor—we are looking at the kind of Level Ten meltdown that—”

“What else was I supposed to do?” she cuts in, her voice nearly a shout in the confined space of the cockpit. She briefly glances at the noise dampener she keeps next to the control panel, but the frustrated huff of breath on the other end of the line is enough to snap her back into the conversation. “You’ve had over a year to make peace with what you did to him, but Phil’s not had that luxury. He thinks everything he knows about his life’s a lie, now, and all because you decided to reach into his brain and play around.”

“You,” Nick grinds out after only a beat of silence, “don’t get to decide what he pokes his nose into, Melinda.”

“Would you rather he spend all his time and energy questioning his medical file?” she presses. “Or that he sit in his office, a shell of the man you’re so proud of saving? Because those are your other options.” She sighs and drags her fingers through her hair. “The Skye investigation’s kept him busy. Motivated, even. He’s not worried about his own issues—instead, he’s worried about hers.” The line crackles, and she rolls her lips together. “You wanted Phil to do his job without questioning his newfound immortality,” she finishes, and Nick snorts at her. “That’s exactly what I'm having him do.”

“Without checking in with a higher authority first.”

“Sorry, next time I’ll fake an emergency and run off to the cockpit to check in before I make a split-second judgment call.”

He falls silent enough that Melinda thinks for a second he’s cut the line, but then it crackles to let her know that no, he’s just quietly fuming. She sighs and stares out the cockpit windows at the long stretch of runway in front of them. She’s not sure about their next stop—Coulson’s hell-bent on hunting down Quinn, but how they’ll find him’s another question entirely—but she’d rather be in the air than here, tethered to a phone and the liar on the other end.

“You don’t have to be happy with me,” Nick finally says, and she rubs the tension lines on her forehead. “You don’t have to agree with the calls I made, and you don’t have to forgive me. All that’s water under the bridge the second you give me the say-so, never mind how I feel about it.” She purses her lips. “But like it or not, you are _still_ one of my agents.”

“I’m one of your agents,” she agrees, her voice clipped and cold even to her own ears, “but I don’t have to heel like your lap dog.”

 

==

 

Phil’s fingers wrap around Melinda’s arm as he leads her up the stairs to the cockpit, and she grits her teeth as she feels his fingernails digging into her skin through her jacket. The plane jolts violently every few seconds as it descends into the Hub’s secure hangar, and she’s certain—or at least, she suspects—that their guns will be Hand’s next target. 

She thinks of the last few weeks—the shooting, the underground bunker that exploded in their wake, Skye’s miraculous recovery, the Asgardian, the Clairvoyant—as Phil drags her along. She thinks of the radio silence on the other end of the line before Fitz cut it, of Fitz in the controls, of the betrayal on Phil’s face when he accused her of reporting in. And she thinks of the blue light that never blinks, of the messages that she’s not sure Nick’s receiving, of—

They’re hardly in the cockpit before the Bus shakes and shudders with EMP blasts. Phil’s voice is rough and dark when he barks, “Get Director Fury on the line or I’ll march you out there first.” 

She clenches her jaw as she opens the control panel and picks up the receiver. Phil glares at her, anger etched into every line of his face as she scans her thumbprint and recites her access code. Standing a foot apart, she feels like there’s a chasm between them.

The chasm opens up to devour them both when a strange voice on the other end of the line says, “Director Fury is dead.”

 

==

 

“You’re not a friend, but I do believe you’re an ally, and we need all the allies we can get,” Phil says later, his voice icy as he straightens his suit coat.

Melinda pretends that the words don't feel like rough jabs to her gut. “What are we planning to do next?” she calls after him.

He squares his shoulders as he walks away. “Survive.”

She stands in the ruined cabin of the Bus for a long time after that, only moving to follow orders once Phil’s walked out of the room. Glass crunches under her feet as she climbs the steps to the cockpit, her gunshot wound sending sharp spikes of pain up through her shoulder. Her whole body aches, the first sign of the bruises from the brawl in the Hub’s control room, and her neck pops when she stretches it.

The control panel door is open when she steps inside the cockpit, the receiver for her secure line hanging limply against the wall. There’s blood spatter nearby from the round she took in the arm when Hand's men shot up the plane. But instead of focusing on that, she stares at the receiver, her fingers curling into fists.

Later, once they’re in the air, she’ll sit in the pilot’s seat and allow the grief to wash over her as she processes the fact that Nick is dead and that the one facility that could save him—the facility that brought Phil back to life, the facility of untested procedures and alien serums—is buried under a mountain. She’ll think of a café outside Paris, of missions in a dozen different countries, of three empty apartments and the last words they exchanged. She’ll think of slapping him, of his lips on her temple, of his laughter and his sighs. 

She'll remember him, mourn him, and silently pray to whatever power looks after people like her that the voice on the other end of the line lied.

Later, she’ll let herself hurt--but not right now.

Because right now, as she hangs up the receiver and closes the control panel, she’s a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent at the end of the world.

There’s work to do.


End file.
